Saturday, February 24, 2018

Wireless Access Points

At home we use a UbiquityUniFi access point. These are commerical grade access points designed to be used as part of a very large network of access points. Think hotels, airports, and office buildings. But one of them works just fine. I recently ran in to some problems with ours.

Last year, this happened and every wireless capable computer system was vulnerable. Updates came out, we updated systems, and life went on. Except me because I forgot the admin login for the access point and didn't get around to updating the firmware until today.

Updating the firmware required removing it from the mounting bracket. This simple task is rendered nearly impossible by the Ubiquity's "secureproof" mounting bracket in order to prevent theft (?) of these things in a commercial setting. After a while, I finally got it removed from the bracket. But...

I accidentally disconnected the power supply before I was ready, so that put a wrench in the works for a while. This was supposed to be a quick process, but was now going to take the better part of the evening to fix.

First, reset to factory defaults. Online discussions forums state you either hold down the reset button with a paper clip for 5 seconds, more than 5 seconds, 10 seconds, or more than 10 seconds. I basically ended up doing all of them and finally it reset itself. I guess this is good because it means a power failure in a commercial setting won't mean the devices won't come back on and be useful. It's really hard to remove the settings from the device through a simple reset.

Now I needed to run the UniFi Controller software. This piece of shit is written in Java and is sort of silent when it comes to error reporting. I needed to make sure the Java Jenga stack was in place and then start the program. I sits and spins for a while and then just says "nope". It doesn't tell me why it failed, just that it was unable to start. Not even a clue.

Since this is all on Windows, I did what you usually do in these situations. Perform some updates, uninstall and reinstall, rearrange the desktop icons, defrag the hard disk. Nothing seemed to work. Time to dig further.

Poking around in the UniFi software directory, I find that it has installed not to C:\Program Files, but rather to my home directory (or user directory or whatever Windows calls it). This seemed odd to me, then I realized that it may not be running the program as the Administrator user. I tried doing that with the right click, run as Administrator trick, but it didn't work. Ugh.

I looked around in the UniFi directory and found a subdirectory called "logs". Wonder what's in there. There were two log files, so I opened the one that started with unifi. This just said information about the program running and so on. Wait. The program ran? No it didn't. The timestamps are from now. Scroll scroll. Ah. OK, so it's trying to connect to a MongoDB service and is timing out. MongoDB? WHHHHHHYYYYYYY?

The other log file was for MongoDB. This file just had the same error over and over. Unable to start because you don't have eleven billion gigabytes of free disk space. Actually, this is exactly how it said it:

Gee, thanks. It would have been nice for UniFi Controller to propagate that up or even just put it in a damn FAQ or in the dialog box. What it really wanted was around 4GB of free space. I had 1.something. OK, let's delete some shit.

The biggest offender were the Blurb book projects I have for my daughter. I use the Blurb software to make these once a year on Windows. The three book projects I have were taking 9.2GB. Bingo. Let's nuke these. But I wanted to move them elsewhere first.

Tried to scp them to my vhost. Nope. Public key failure. Oh right, I need to do that. Well, why not cheat and use the key from my workstation? USB'ed that over and oh you can't use that because PuTTY has a different damn key file format than OpenSSH. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. FINE.

I wiped a 32GB USB flash drive and copied all the Blurb stuff to that, then deleted it. This took forever because of course it did.

With the hard disk sporting enough free space to run UniFi Controller, I'm back in business. I ran it and claimed the access point and began setting it up again. I also updated the firmware to the latest version so we are protected from KRACK and maybe other things.

Very annoying and I'm mostly writing it down here because when I need to do this again, I'm going to run in to the not enough disk space problem again and won't know what to do.